


Through the Few Gaps in our Bodies Grows Myrtle

by attheendoftheday



Category: Call Me By Your Name (2017)
Genre: First Kiss, Gardens & Gardening, I am a writer not a horticulturalist ok, M/M, elio is loves flowers and is horny as usual, flagrant disregard for the climate and native plants of Italy, oliver is a botany student
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-06
Updated: 2019-06-06
Packaged: 2020-04-11 23:26:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,405
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19119868
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/attheendoftheday/pseuds/attheendoftheday
Summary: “Will you send me flowers?” Elio asks. “When you leave?"





	Through the Few Gaps in our Bodies Grows Myrtle

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this almost exactly a year ago, but it remained buried until I cleaned out my Google Docs this afternoon. I didn't edit this one, like AT ALL, so pardon any mistakes!
> 
> I feel quite attached to these incarnations of Elio and Oliver. I hope you enjoy them, too!

Elio’s hands are six inches deep in dirt when he sees him for the first time.

It’s May, long past time for planting, but Elio is beginning late; a new bulb is in his hands and he is plunging the violet deep into the earth. His mother had inexplicably found it on the first day back at the villa, her suitcase propped against the door as she cooed over it. Poor thing, she had said. It’s missed spring.

I’ll plant it, Elio had responded. It’s not too late.

He is focusing so much of his efforts on it — on the beads of sweat on the back of his neck, on the smell of soil, on the slivers of wood pressed against his bare knees (he had stopped by impulsively, with shorts on) — that he doesn’t noticed the newcomer in the garden until Achise walks up to him and says, “We have a new guest.”

Elio looks up, his hands six inches deep in the dirt, and his fingers stop moving. Anchise’s thin frame, topped with his well-worn hat, stands to Elio’s left. In the center, blocking the sun, is a silhouette.

“This is Oliver.”

Elio blinks. The silhouette moves and becomes a man, looming, everything about him hyphenated: too-long arms and pushed-back hair and a buttoned-up shirt and rolled-up sleeves.

“Pleased to meet you,” Oliver says, in English, and he outstretches a hand. Elio pulls out his right, and then pauses, aware of the dirt encrusting his fingernails (he hadn’t bothered with gloves, either). Oliver smiles.

“I don’t mind,” he says. They shake.

Anchise follows the introduction with some other details — a volunteer for the summer, foreign, American, m _ust be a graduate student but not sure in what_ — but Elio only guesses at what he’s saying, absent-mindedly piecing together the separate words he picks up, when really he’s distracted by the warm, worn calluses on Oliver’s hands. He lets go and worries he shook it for too long. He thinks he forgets to smile.

“You’re welcome for the shade,” Oliver says with a smile. He moves out of the way and Elio drops his gaze, blinded by the sudden reappearance of the sun.

-

Elio shows up at the garden every other day, most summers, one or two days in between visits, sometimes three, depending on what he’s doing. Sometimes it rains too hard — there have been rainy summers, the past several years — and sometimes he gets lost in a book, and sometimes his cousins visit, and sometimes Marzia and her crowd persuade him to get coffee or swim or lie underneath the trees in the morning, when the sun is not yet too hot. But this summer has been sunny, he hasn’t had a chance to visit the bookstores for something new, and Marzia is in a cousin’s wedding party in France and will not arrive for two more weeks, and her crowd is not the kind to invite Elio without her.

And _that_ is why he has been going every day, and staying longer.

Elio tells himself this when he is biking there for the fifth day in a row, his backpack with water and gloves and tools and whatever else he needs slung across his back, his legs hot in his long jeans. _That’s_ why.

And Anchise makes a comment — I’ve been seeing more of you lately, the flowers keep drawing you back, soon the tomatoes will be ripe, no? — and Elio nods, gives a close-lipped smile, and looks over Anchise’s shoulder to see Oliver carrying a bag of mulch. Elio excuses himself.

“Would you like help with that?” he asks. Oliver puts down the bag, and Elio watches him wipe his brow. He’s already sweating through his white shirt, this early, and his jeans — faded, light blue — are cuffed above his work boots. The tip of his nose is the color of a Babylon Bronze Dahlia.

Elio shifts, aware, suddenly, of his thin frame, how he has to look decidedly _up_ at Oliver, at the way his hair curls when he sweats. But Oliver says nothing, just looks at him in a way that Elio has no idea how to interpret, and says, “If you want.”

They carry the bags and open them, begin laying the mulch down to replenish the bare dirt areas worn from constant footsteps, weaving in between the rose bushes.

“I don’t really like roses,” Oliver says, out of the blue.

Elio keeps looking down, focusing on the rhythmic way his hands spread the mulch, scoop, pour, spread, sometimes just putting his hand in and smelling the wetness. This is the most he’s heard Oliver speak since the first day (he’s been thinking of it as the first day, he doesn’t understand why he needs an article there but it seems appropriate).

“Why?”

“They seem so garish. Maybe it’s just because the symbolism has become so widespread. I look at them and see a supermarket counter the day before Valentine’s Day.”

“Maybe you’ve just been spending too much time in supermarkets.”

“Maybe.”

There’s another pause, this one promising to last. But the silence has been broken, and Elio can’t bear to repair it, so he says, “I miss the flowers in America.”

“Oh?”

“Sometimes.”

“What kinds of flowers? I don’t miss them. I’ve spent too much time looking at them in classes.”

“Like coneflowers. What do you study?”

“Botany. Coneflowers. Interesting. _Echinacea_.”

“Meaning strength.”

“Do you know all the names of the flowers?”

Oliver looks up at this, and so does Elio, and their eyes meet; a strand of Oliver’s hair has fallen over his face. Elio sits up on his heels.

“Most. I like meanings more, though.”

Oliver sits up, too. “I always preferred the meanings as well. Poppies are obvious, but interesting.”

“ _Papaver somniferum_ ; sleep, peace, or death. Anemone?”

“Anticipation for the future. Though that one has several meanings.”

Elio laughs, and wipes the sweat out of his eyes. It’s nearing two; he has to be back at the house for lunch or Mafalda will sigh heavily and his mother will ask questions. “When I mentioned American flowers — I miss Dogwood trees.”

“Dogwood?” Oliver asks.

“Their meaning is interesting,” Elio says.

“Christianity? The crucifixion?”

“There are several meanings,” Elio repeats. Before he can go on — and he doesn’t know if he is going to go on, anyway — he hears Anchise whistling, his brown wrinkled fingers pressed between his lips, signalling that the day is paused for now. Elio takes his time sitting up, brushing the dirt and wood chips off his pants, peeling off his gloves. When he chances a look in Oliver’s direction, the other man has an expression on his face that Elio cannot understand. Suddenly he feels a great need to hurry and leave.

“I have to go,” he says to Oliver.

“Later.” And that word, too, is unreadable.

Elio flies home, the dirt caked into his bicycle’s wheels loosening and leaving a trail on the road behind him. When he’s sitting at the lunch table, Mafalda pours him a glass of juice.

You seem distracted, she says. Her tone is the same as if she was saying, you seem sick. It’s nothing, he says, and he lifts the fork to his mouth. Inside his head he’s replaying their conversation.

_I miss Dogwood trees._

_Christianity, the Crucifixion?_

Desire, unreciprocated affection, illusion, am I indifferent to you?

_There are other meanings._

-

The next morning Elio goes to the garden, earlier than usual, because he woke up early and felt like he could never fall back to sleep so he lay on his bed, naked, watching the dusty sunlight slowly, slowly stream in. But against all his plans he had fallen asleep and wakes up several hours later, sleeping late, missing breakfast — he’s sure to hear something about that later — and instead throws on clothes and hastily runs down to his bike, picking it up from where it leans against the wall, wheels already turning before he can get his left foot onto the pedals. He still shows up late.

When he gets there Anchise is nowhere to be found, probably in the backs of the sheds, and there’s more people than usual. With a jolt he realizes that today is a Saturday, a day he usually would spend doing other things; it registers hazily in the back of his mind that other people use the gardens, too, and find nothing better to do on a weekend morning than tend to their plots. He can’t find Oliver immediately; he goes to his own plot under the guise of checking his own flowers. He cranes his neck, looking around, and sees him, hands on his hips, laughing at something a girl is saying in front of him. Elio looks at the girl and her denim dress, and looks back at Oliver. Oliver meets his eyes briefly, smiling at whatever the girl is saying, and nods. Elio doesn’t nod back; somehow it feels more of a dismissal than a recognition.

He slouches, putters around his plot, and leaves within a half hour. He’s not nearly late for lunch.

He lays on his bed, after, looking out the window, feeling rejected, feeling silly for feeling rejected, trying to talk himself out of talking himself into analyzing every microexpression and movement of Oliver’s body.

Begonia. _Caution_.

The girl doesn’t show up in the days after that — Elio makes a note of looking — and Oliver doesn’t seem to be spotted talking with any other girls, anyway. They still have other conversations, though. Elio continues to weave his way into different work, arriving as soon as the garden's opening or even a little bit before, before the day has really started. His mother asks him what has gotten into him; Elio has never particularly been an early riser.

You’re liking the garden, then? She asks. How long until everything blooms?

I don’t know, Mama, he says back to her. Soon, I hope.

She looks at him in that way, the way that everybody seems to be looking at Elio now — like they know everything and he’s too much of a child to figure it out. It makes him feel embarrassed, and he walks out to his bike with an odd sense of shame.

_

Elio treats gardens with a reverence to rival Anchise’s: feet carefully placed, every blossom known by name. He used to think of himself as a caregiver, never an intruder, but he looks at Oliver and he thinks _you can take me here. On the grass, crushing the flowers. You can take me anywhere you’d like._

One Saturday, a week later, he and Oliver work together again, on the same plot, working steadily before the eleven o’clock crowd arrives and Oliver is pulled away again. They talk about flowers, about Oliver’s reasons to come to Italy, Elio’s reason for being here.

“I needed an apprenticeship, and I needed to get away from my home,” Oliver says, and the way he says the last two words sounds like the shutting of a door. Elio wants to know more, desperately wants to know more and add every additional word Oliver says to the steadily growing file of his brain he is dedicating to such information. (The time for guises has long past; Elio knows exactly what he is up to.)

“Do you like it here?” Elio asks. The way he asks it sounds smaller than he means it to be. “Have you met anyone?”

The look Oliver fixes him with makes him feel exposed, though the exposure is, in some odd way, delicious, like the loosening of an uncomfortably tight belt. He knows what Elio is up to, too.

“A few,” Oliver says, and he smiles down at the ground.

Elio replays those two words, a few a few a few a few, and tries to count how many people Oliver could know to constitute a few, wants to know if a few meant _you_ and meant _I want it, too_.

That night he imagines another evening, a cloudy day when the only sign night is coming is the steady lengthening of the shadows and the grays becoming grayer. When he is outside alone, working, and Oliver is behind him and clasps his hand around the back of his neck — and Elio knows his hand is rough, knows it is from the gloves and tools, but in his mind it is always so soft.

Elio is on his back, stems and petals crushed beneath him, _press the air out of me, let us stay here, unmoving, and through the few gaps in our bodies grows myrtle, hadas, הֲדַס, the wedding flower_.

Elio accidentally sleeps late, the following morning, and wakes up hard.

-

It’s well into June when things come to a head. It’s a weekday, Wednesday, not yet brutally hot, as it will be come midsummer, but the air still holds the promise of heat, like the prickle underneath one’s skin before they begin to sweat. It had been a slow day. Elio and Oliver sit sorting stones, of all things, for one of Anchise’s projects. Anchise had long since accepted Elio’s position as a sort of second apprentice, with looser hours and no paycheck, his return for using the garden his labor — _just don’t expect any coins from me_ , he had said, wagging his finger. Neither of them are particularly enthused by the task, so they again strike up one of those wonderful conversations that only boredom and sweat can produce.

“What do you do,” Oliver asks, “when you’re not at the garden?”

“Read books,” Elio supplies. “Eat. Sleep. Wander. What do you do?”

“Some reading, much wandering,” Oliver responds. “I’m still exploring. I’ve found some niches.”

Elio looks up, and sees that the sun has passed directly overhead. Soon Anchise will wet his lips and whistle sharply, and he will head home on his bike and Oliver will go wherever he goes, and Elio is struck with an idea. Anchise whistles. Elio inhales. “Would you like to go into town with me?” He asks. Oliver raises an eyebrow.

“Right now? It’s almost lunch. Things will close soon.”

“That’s okay,” Elio finds himself saying. “Unless you don’t want to. I have a bike. I have some places outside I’d like to show you.”

Oliver sits back on his heels, seems to hesitate for a moment, before nodding decisively. “Let me put my things away,” he says.

They clean up their items in silence, Anchise working as well. Anchise gestures towards his truck, like a question, but Oliver waves him off. “I have a bike,” he says, to explain. “I like to get a ride in midday, though.”

They walk together to where Elio’s bike is laying on the ground. Elio picks it up and slings one leg over it, waiting to follow Oliver. Oliver laughs and holds up a hand, signaling wait. Elio is afraid, for a reason he’s not entirely sure of. He looks around, taking note of the trees and the blue of the sky and the motes of dust floating in the air. A bell rings to his right, and he looks back around; Oliver is silently gliding towards him on his bike, blue like his jeans and his eyes. His shoulders round as he leans over to grab the steering wheel.

“After you?” Oliver asks, and Elio nods. They ride together down the lane in silence, except for the occasional warning about rocks or branches strewing the path. Elio knows the path well; his villa weaves through other more country homes - not many, but enough - that border the water; down the wide dirt lane are offshoots that lead to other houses and the garden, and the lane widens to let in cars that are leading up from the main town. He decides to not take this route; instead, when they make the turn just before the road widening further up, he turns left. Oliver, who had been riding next to him rather than behind him, has to turn sharply.

“Thanks for the warning,” he says, wry.

One side of Elio’s mouth lifts up, and he smiles to himself. “This is the more scenic route,” Elio says. “The other way widens up - you probably have seen it - but this way is friendly to bikes and you get less traffic, anyway.”

Oliver whistles, and leans down on his handlebars. “Better scenery.” The wildflowers line the path; Elio names them all in his head. Eventually he shifts to naming them out loud, and whenever he falters Oliver steps in and names then, too, sometimes giving a summary of when he first saw one or one of their symbolic meanings. Sometimes Elio genuinely doesn’t know the name, much less the meaning; others he pauses just long enough, like testing the water, to see if Oliver will answer. He likes hearing the words come out of his mouth.

The town is dusty and hot; everyone is inside, eating, shielding themselves from the sun. There is a cafe open on the corner that Elio has been to before - but clearly, so has Oliver, judging from the enthusiastic way in which he greets the owner, in Italian that is just slightly garbled but enough to do the job.

“I thought you said you hadn’t been much to town,” Elio says once they’re seated, at one of the small, two-person wooden tables inside. They both had decided that outside, today, was too hot; it may have been different if they both hadn’t spent the morning in the sun, hunched over, and then another several minutes in the sun hunched over on their bicycles. Although not air conditioned, the shade of the cafe is cool, the windows letting the sun in and letting the coolness of the concrete floors counteract. Elio feels silly at the impression he had gotten - that he would be the first to show Oliver around, _look at my town,_ and in that way weave himself inextricably into Oliver’s memories, so that he would always have some trace in this place, wherever Oliver went. Instead, he now feels rather silly.

“Much,” Oliver clarifies. He pours a bottle of water into Elio’s glass, and then into his own. “I’ve seen a few sights.”

“Anything in particular you like?” Elio says. He sits back in his chair, glass in his hand. As soon as he says it he feels a little embarrassed again, but also emboldened; they both know the double entendre, so at least they’re getting somewhere.

Oliver hums noncommittally. “Some things,” he says, and he’s cut off by a selection of food and coffee placed in front of them.

They eat quickly; both hadn’t realized just how hungry they were, and the shops close in the early afternoon anyway. 

They bike back rather in silence, the morning catching up to them - or at least, Oliver seems calm and sated. Elio feels like a live wire. He counts every word he said to Oliver as another one, storing them again in his bank.

“Thank you for the accompaniment,” Oliver says, stopping at the garden.

“It was my pleasure.”

“Will you be here tomorrow?”

“Yes.” Elio thinks, I'd sleep here if you asked. Oliver nods.

“Later,” he says, and turns his bicycle around, a goodbye without saying goodbye.

Elio speeds home. Mafalda scolds him for being late and only gets even more incensed when he seems unable to muster up a proper sense of apology and regret.

-

The taste of the espresso that they drank in the town lingers in Elio’s mind. He wants to lick espresso off of the hollows above Oliver’s collarbones, line up every one of the lines of his body - the ones marking his upper arms when he raises them above his head to pull something from a top shelf, his cheekbones when he turns his face the right way and the sun illuminates the shadow running down the side of his face, underneath his jaw, the backs of his knees and the inside of his elbows — and run his tongue along them, tasting the sweat and dirt, tasting like the air in the morning after a rainy night.

_

The next morning Elio bikes to the garden. They work like usual, pulling weeds and stones, watering the more forgotten plants. Anchise isn’t here, Oliver says. He had been sick. Anchise usually never misses a day of work, so this is rather disturbing. He looks rather worried.

I can be your assistant today, Elio offers. Oliver laughs, and hands him a spade. No one is really there today; Elio remembers that it’s always gotten slow like this, when it gets towards the middle of the holidays. More people come, yes, but everyone is visiting their friends, getting settled, going to the beach, going anywhere but a community garden. Elio doesn’t mind.

When it gets warmer and no one still has yet arrived, Oliver makes the executive decision to move inside to the large garden shed and work on organizing it.

“This has bothered me every since I started working here,” he says. At “this” he gestures to mean the entire shed. It seems to be organized — at least, someone began putting this in different piles and corners with the intent or organizing it, but the entire system seems rather haphazard and difficult to decode. They decide to start off with taking everything out entirely. The shed itself is welcomingly musty and cool, cool in the way that only a structure incredibly dusty and untouched and damp can be. Wet earth dries on the metal bars of different tools, and underneath the far reaches of one of the benches lies a few scattered dried, dead leaves. The sight strikes Elio; in his mind, it is perpetual summer here, or, for brief weeks, full of snow. It seems obvious to him that fall and spring do exist here, but it seems like should belong in a different universe. The memories of his school and America are distant. He wonders when Oliver is going to leave, but is too afraid to find out the answer.

Instead he focuses his attention into cleaning out the shed. The dampness and coolness of the shed keep the heat from becoming too oppressive, but Elio and Oliver soon work up a sweat. When the shed is completely emptied, the two stand in the middle of the empty room. Oliver walks out briefly to look outside, double check if there’s anyone he has to serve or guide. He reports back saying the garden is still empty, but the sun has risen even further and the heat has become even more oppressive and burning.

Oliver wipes the sweat off his forehead. “It’s burning up out there.” Elio nods, agrees, mumbles something about the weather that he doesn’t even notice. He’s standing in an empty room with Oliver, and for some reason the absolute completely alone-ness of the two of them together strikes him. Oliver holds up a finger, signalling for Elio to stop, although he wasn’t actually moving anything in the moment.

“I think it’s time for a break,” he says. He leaves the shed for a moment, leaving Elio standing there, watching the dust motes float in the air. Oliver soon returns with his satchel, a tired old tan leather thing that must be bigger on the inside than it appears because from it he pulls out two bottles of sparkling lemonade. He offers one to Elio, and Elio accepts.

“Cheers,” Oliver says, clinking his bottle to Elio’s before taking a gulp. The lemonade is sweet and bubbling, not so much quenching the thirst as providing something interesting to taste in the absence of a proper lunch.

Elio sits down on the ground, the cold concrete beneath him. He drags his knuckles along the cracks, their sweat picking up the scattered dirt particles. Oliver sits down, too, and they sit cross-legged across from one another, sipping the lemonade slowly.

“Why do you spend so much time at the garden?” Oliver asks.

“I like plants,” Elio says. “I like them more than people.”

Oliver takes a sip of his lemonade, swallows. “Why?”

“I don’t think many people like me.”

“I like you,” Oliver says.

Elio focuses on the bubbles on his tongue, swallowing. “I like you too,” he says. He scratches a mosquito bite on the inside of his ankle.

Now it’s Oliver’s turn to be silent. He is tracing a pattern in the dirt with his index finger. He looks up at Elio, and their eyes meet, and his eyes are the purest blue that Elio’s ever seen, and they’re looking up at him unguarded in a way that they never were before. “I like you too much, I think.”

Elio wants to bite back a scream. “Do you know how much I ached for you to like me?” he asks. He sets his lemonade bottle down next to him, and the concrete is cold beneath his hands.

-

Oliver’s lips taste like salt, like dew, like the last drop of wine at the bottom of the bottle.

-

The summer speeds up, after that. Elio spends as much time as he can avoiding looking at the calendar, every day another red line crossing out the box, counting down the day until Oliver leaves. Mafalda makes a comment about how the summer is already mostly over and the bottom of his stomach drops out.

It makes him seek out Oliver, that night; during the day the air between them is charged, like it has been for the entire summer so far, and that night they go to a patch of grass on the road to town, so narrow that no one can reach it except on foot, and Oliver covers Elio with his body and Elio thinks, _this is all I could possibly need._

-

One night afterwards Elio lays, his head rested on Oliver’s chest, feeling the air rise in and out, raising his head just slightly, allowing for the movement up and down, the bottom edge of a constellation falling in and out of his line of vision.

The air smells like violets.

“Will you send me flowers?” Elio asks. “When you leave?”

He doesn’t know how this is possible, only that he wants it more than he wants anything.

“All the way from America?” Oliver asks, chuckling.

“Will you?”

Oliver says nothing, just raises his hand and traces a pattern on the back of Elio’s hand.


End file.
